iComp writes: "An anonymous researcher has taken an unorthodox approach to achieve the dream of mapping out the entire remaining IPv4 internet, and has broken enough laws around the world to make them liable for many thousands of years behind bars in doing so, if current sentencing policy prevails.

Getting the sheer numbers of IPv4 addresses involved would take a huge amount of scanners to make billions of pings. While noodling around with an Nmap scripting engine the researcher noticed a lot of virtually unsecured IPv4 devices – only requiring the admin/admin, root/root login, or either admin or root with the password field blank. What if these could be used as a temporary botnet to perform?

"I did not want to ask myself for the rest of my life how much fun it could have been or if the infrastructure I imagined in my head would have worked as expected," the report "Internet Census 2012" states.

"I saw the chance to really work on an Internet scale, command hundred thousands of devices with a click of my mouse, portscan and map the whole Internet in a way nobody had done before, basically have fun with computers and the Internet in a way very few people ever will."

The report states a 46 and 60 kb binary was written in C with two parts; a telnet scanner to try the login connection and propagate and then control code to assign scan ranges and feed the results back. A reboot of the infected system would wipe the binary completely and the code didn't scan traffic running though the device or any intranet-connected systems."